Oranges and Lemons of St. Clement’s is a traditional English nursery rhyme which references the bells of several churches within the vicinity of the City of London. It is also a children’s singing game, in which two children place their hands together to form an arch to symbolize the arch of sanctuary while the others pass under the arch in pairs as the song is sung. When arrives “Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!” the pair caught under the arch must make another arch. The song is then repeated until all the children have been “beheaded.”
This nursery rhyme was a recurring theme in George Orwell’s novel 1984, which portrayed Winston Smith as he navigated life underneath the house of Big Brother. In the first instance, Winston was visiting a junk shop filled with antique furniture – lacquered snuffboxes, agate brooches, a heavy lump of glass with a peculiar softness as of rainwater, at the heart of it lain a pink coral from the Indian Ocean. In the grey, concrete, contemporary world of Big Brother, this antique house that Winston was particularly fond of must have represented the world of the old aristocracy.
Upstairs of the shop lay another room with a mahogany bed, beautiful but full of bugs. Opposite the bed, on the other side of the fireplace hung a picture in a rosewood frame. The picture was a steel engraving of the church of St. Clement’s Dane, which was outside the Law Courts. Here came the first two lines of the rhyme, sung by the shop owner Mr. Charrington:
“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.
You owe me three farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s.”
The church of St. Martin’s still stood in Victory Square. St. Martin’s Day marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter. It was celebrated with a feast, traditionally served with a roasted goose. However, as goose was expensive to come by, it was primarily observed by the noblemen, while peasants ate duck or hen instead. A legend told that Saint Martin, when trying to avoid being ordained bishop, hid in a pen of geese whose cackling gave him away.
In the second account, Winston was in the room with his lover Julia. As they looked at the glass paperweight, she asked what he thought it was, to which Winston replied “it’s a little chunk of history that they’ve forgotten to alter. It’s a message from a hundred years ago, if one knew how to read it.” The steel engraving of St. Clement’s Dane was possibly two hundred years old, but it was impossible to discover the age of anything nowadays. Then Julia filled in the next line of the rhyme:
“When will you pay me? say the bells at Old Bailey.”
The church of Saint Sepulchre-without-Newgate lies next to the Old Bailey, which is the common reference to the Central Criminal Court. At this point, they wondered what lemons and oranges were. They remembered oranges to be a kind of round yellow fruit with a thick skin, and lemons to be so sour that “it set your teeth on edge even to smell them.” Nobody seemed to remember anything in 1984, but we know how this rhyme ends:
“When I grow rich, say the bells at Shoreditch.
When will that be? say the bells of Stepney.
I do not know, says the great bell at Bow.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed.
Here comes a chopper to chop off your head!”
Prior to visiting the junk shop, Winston had stopped by a prole pub, “prole” for proletariat, or the working class. He wanted to ask a very old man whether life was better or worse before the Revolution, hoping that the old man would be able to remember the past. But the man never did give a straight answer. The proles were considered inferior, as they filled their days with work, petty quarrels, and gambling. Only among them was promiscuity unpunished and divorce permitted. As the Party slogan put it: “Proles and animals are free.” In this world where day by day, minute by minute, all could be altered to bring the past up to date, within a prole nursery rhyme may one find a remnant of history.
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